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I will be joining forces with Katt McConnell on Saturday, October 2nd, to go busking in Broad Ripple. We will more than likely be somewhere near the Rainbow Bridge on Guilford Avenue, or we’ll find a cozy spot along the Monon where we’re not too in the way. If you come looking and don’t find us right away I’d suggest wandering around the Ripple and following the sound of the Super Seagull guitar… or the lovely fiery-haired soprano making all the passers-by swoon and stuff.

We should be getting there by around 3:00pm but might not be set up and actually playing/singing until around 3:30pm to 4:00pm. We’ll stick around probably until we’re tired, we’ll see. This is kindof an experiment so it’s tough to say just what will happen. And of course if there is a big horde around us we will probably be in the way of other folk trying to get from one place or another and get into trouble, so please feel free to come by and say hello if you happen to be in the area (or if you’d REALLY like to PUT yourself in the area, that’d be awesome), but please be respectful of the neighborhood and try not to treat it like the street is a concert hall. We don’t want to be pests. =)

Also if you’d like to assist in carrying things or help hand out flyers for the show on October 8th please feel free to email me. Again, I don’t want to have a horde of people hanging out on the street and we will have very specific rules about how things are to be distributed so as not to get into any trouble with the locals, so please be respectful of that. There’s a fine line between busking and panhandling/soliciting and I’d REALLY prefer to stay on the busking side of it.

So my rock-awesome little brother who is WAY cooler than me, Cory Pettit, booked your favorite Folk-Rock Superhero to play a gig in the midst of a bunch of really cool boy bands. Okay they might have girls in them too, I didn’t look really closely. But they’re all pretty damned talented and you should come see.

The show is at “The Dojo” (2207 N. College Avenue Indianapolis, IN) on October 8th at 7:00pm. Cost is $5 for all ages. Yours truly plays at 7:30pm, but I’d encourage watching the other bands too. Indie is tough stuff, having people listen to you play is NICE.

Sorry I haven’t blogged in a while. I’ve had a lot of crap on my mind, but none of it’s seemed worth talking about. Still, perhaps getting some of it out would be a bit cathartic.

I’ve been depressed lately. It’s difficult even for me to really understand why, but it seems like every little piddly thing has made me feel lonely and left out. The only thing that I can surmise is that it has to do with all of the crap going down in my family.

I haven’t talked to my Mother in a few weeks now. Once upon a time, if I mentioned that my Mother was difficult to deal with and that I didn’t particularly WANT to deal with her, I’d have gotten flack from people. “She’s your Mother. You can’t just ditch her.” Here recently though, when I’ve mentioned that I don’t deal with her to people who know me well enough to know my history with her, I seem to run into something akin to relief. Several of the people around me worried when I started talking to her again that she would do SOMETHING crazy to fuck me up. And she did. It’s funny how predictable some people can be.

I’ve just gotten to the point where I don’t really get it. I mean, I guess it’s typical form for her… there’s a man in the picture that she wants to be with, her kids object, and she picks him over them. She married my current step-Dad under those conditions, and the one before him I didn’t even MEET until the wedding (he turned out to be an emotionally abusive douche)… and now that we actually LIKE my current Step-Dad, she’s pawning after my biological father. The thing that kills me is that all of the things that she bitches about in regards to my Step-Dad, are things that my biological father has in SPADES. But she doesn’t see them. Why? Well, because he’s married to someone ELSE. And she doesn’t give much license to THAT, either.

Meanwhile, in the world of my sperm-donor, he’s gone about telling my Step-Mom, whom I actually DID like, that the affair that she heard about him having was something that I fabricated to break up their marriage. WHY I would want to break up their marriage is beyond me, but apparently he’s fed her enough bullshit about me over the years that it’s actually a believable story for her, and for my Step-Sister.

And so, once again, much like I did when my brother Wil decided to scream at me over religion for no good reason and make it next to impossible for me to attend family functions that he would be at… I feel outcast.

People close to me probably think that I’m better off for this, and they’re more than likely right. My family (excluding my little brother Cory, my big sister Sheila, and my oldest brother Brian) has little to offer aside from abuse, heartbreak, and manipulation. But that doesn’t stop me from feeling hurt over it. I’m an adult now, my father’s lived in Wisconsin since ‘93 and previous to that I had a little over a year with him here in town after not having seen him since ‘85. I visited him a few times in Wisconsin, but by and large he wasn’t a part of my life. Then, a couple of years ago, he retired from the job that took him so far away to move back to Indianapolis, back to a place where I could actually SEE him on a regular basis, maybe even have a RELATIONSHIP with him… only to get pissed at me over the fight with my brother Wil (but pretty much say dick to him), have an affair with my mother, and then lie about me.

And the fact of the matter is… I don’t really know how to deal.

So I internalize it, and then it shows up in the form of a vacuous, endless, black hole of need that has always been there to a small degree, but that is so astoundingly huge at this point that I can barely ignore it… so huge that it will suck all of the life out of my face and start pulling at the joy in the room if I stay in it too long – or at least that’s how I feel.

Nothing fixes it… and that’s part of why I’m writing about it. I spend time with people and I KNOW I look sad and I KNOW I mention feeling left out and, I want you to know, if you’re near me, that it has pretty much NOTHING to do with anything you’re doing or not doing. I know that’s hard to deal with, because when someone’s in your presence and they feel left out, you feel like you did something to LEAVE them out, and that you need to do something to INCLUDE them. It isn’t so, honestly. I know this beast. I dealt with it through most of my childhood. I’ve seen it in other people. And it’s more than likely nothing more than my psyche dealing with a situation completely separate that the rest of my brain doesn’t know how to appropriately deal with.

I’m hoping it eventually passes, but the bottom line is that I feel adrift, outcast, and it’s poured over from my family into my general feelings about the world, which is probably actually a pretty normal thing. Our relationships with our family tend to define our relationships with other people… it’s sortof basic psychology, I think. It’s how we operate. The trick, if you have a shitty relationship with most of your family (or at least your parents), is figuring out how to not LET it define your relationships with other people… and that’s hard.

There is a time in your life when your family is really your whole world. Your parents know everything, and they have all the answers. If they say that’s the way the world works, that’s the way the world works. And yeah, you grow out of it… but there’s always some part of your psyche that is still there. That part fucks with you when your parents do the kind of shit that my parents do. And that’s where I am.

And at some point hopefully I’ll be able to talk that beast into realizing that she doesn’t live at home anymore, what her Dad thinks isn’t gospel, how her Mom treats her doesn’t have to affect her because she can make those decisions for herself, and that she’s not really a monster but a little girl who, quite understandably and humanly, just wants to be loved…

And, bigger than that, she is. Maybe not by the people she was born to, but by her family.

Hopefully I can get that through to her. She’s a cute kid, but she can be awfully thickheaded.

I don’t have time to write all of what went on today or the things that are in my head tonight in regards to the whole situation, so I’m just going to post the letter I sent to Melody, the egg-donor formerly known as my biological mother, and let you get the story from that.

By the way, my apologies if you are offended by what I had to say at the end, but it was what I felt and my truth, not a slam at every instance of faith in the universe. I do not have any respect for her conception of deity. You may worship a deity of the same name with some of the same features, but if you are my friend, trust me when I say that she worships a completely different one of her own making, and that I mean no disrespect to your faith by any stretch of the imagination.
Melody,

Bill King, who has up to this point claimed himself the title of my Father, decided to drag my name through the mud, call me a liar and claim that I was trying to destroy his marriage, so that he could continue to betray his wife and his step-daughters. So you decided that instead of telling me the truth, giving me the chance to clear myself, you would hide… because it was what he wanted.

You told Cory, and told him not to tell me because you didn’t want me to go to Bill about it. Why would you not want me to know, if it weren’t to protect yourself AND him? To continue to support him and HELP him rip my name and my honor… me, who is his daughter… to shreds, just so that he could continue to betray his family and string you along? And you did that, for nothing more than a shred of his attention.

Then when Cory told me and I confronted you, instead of owning up to what you did, you lied. And you can say that you lied so that I wouldn’t be mad at you for not doing anything in the first place, but that begs the question… why didn’t you do anything in the first place? You don’t have that excuse for helping Bill lie about me and accuse me of maliciously trying to break up his marriage for no good reason, and by keeping it from me, that is exactly what you were doing. You were enabling it. You were helping. So to further protect yourself, but moreso, I think (because this was your reason in the first place) to continue to help him to do this to me, you did even worse… you lied about Cory. You lied about Cory in the same way and for the same reasons that Bill lied about me. What he did to me, when he lied to his wife and step-daughters (or even just let them believe it, which is just as bad) that he never had any dealing with you, and that I had made up the whole thing, out of nowhere, for no reason… you did that same thing to Cory. You are willing to be just as abusive and moral-less as he is.

And in the meantime, you had the nerve to be angry with Cory because YOU wanted to play the victim. You decided that the only reason he might have for telling me the truth was to hurt you. Pretty much the same way you decided that whoever told Barb the truth did it to hurt Bill. You’re so stuck up your own ass that you can’t see the truth, the reality, that people tell one another the truth because they deserve to know, because they deserve to be TOLD the truth, by their spouses and, if not them, by someone who WILL be honest with them and treat them with some modicrum of respect. And you called him an ungrateful brat for that. A name that I find chillingly familiar. Despite the fact that you had blatantly used Cory as a shield to protect yourself, and Bill as well, from the truth… despite the fact that you were willing to tell his own sister that he was maliciously lying to her and was willing to fuck with her head when it was in fact YOU who was doing that, you still had the nerve to be angry with him and pick fights with him.

And then, last night, you apologized, for the lying.

To me.

You seemed pretty contrite, so although I wanted time and I didn’t trust you any further than I could throw you because, even if you’re sincere (which frankly, I don’t know anymore), I couldn’t trust your judgment, I still thought that it was possible that you were being genuine, that you really understood the gravity of the fact that you not only helped this man hurt me and shame me over something that wasn’t even TRUE, but you were willing to hurt and shame your own SON for something that wasn’t even true. And I was still thinking about that today.

Chris had mentioned to Cory that you had badmouthed he and Zoey around us and that it made him (Chris) uncomfortable, and that now that this came out, he had a good reason not to believe the things that you said about them (or at least to figure that you had twisted their actions in your own mind to make yourself a martyr.) Cory and I talked about it today, and he said that it really bothered him that you were badmouthing him and Zoey to Chris and I. And I told him, because I wanted to know what his response would be, I wanted to know the truth, or at least his perspective… I told him that you had said that Zoey was controlling and that she lied all of the time. I didn’t do it to “turn him against you”, so you can quit telling yourself that. I did it because I wanted to know what he would say… if perhaps he would tell me that Zoey does have a flair for the dramatic, or that maybe she exaggerates… and then at least I could feel like there MIGHT be SOME credit to what you were saying.

He didn’t say any of those things. He had no reason to. For the same reason, I’m willing to bet, that you never had any examples of Zoey actually lying.

And it bothered Cory. But he wasn’t planning on bringing it up, until you picked a fight with him. And then he confronted you about it.

And then you, who swore up and down to me last night that you were sorry for telling me that Cory had been lying to me and that you hadn’t said the things that he told me you said… told Cory that I was lying and that you didn’t say the things that I told him you said.

You said you were sorry. I think it’s possible that you even believed you WERE sorry. But what I want to tell you now, is that you were not, in fact, sorry. Because you had a rule once and that rule has stayed with me since I was young.

You’re not sorry if you turn around and do it again.

I think that you were upset that I was mad at you. I think that you are a sad, frightened person with abandonment issues and that you had me and hoped that I, at least, wouldn’t leave you, that you could talk to me and I could make you feel better and care about you. I think that that’s a shame. I think that you think the same thing about Cory. Cory, for good or ill, hasn’t had the life experiences that I’ve had to teach him that people like that have issues, they are not healthy, and they’re looking for co-dependency, not love. But even that, I could forgive. Even that I could deal with, because I thought that you were my Mother.

But it’s the fact that you want and need so desperately to find some way, consciously or unconsciously, to keep Cory and I attached to you, whether it’s by feeling sorry for you, or believing that you’re contrite and that you agree with us, or by appealing to genetic ties… and that you are ALSO willing to not only let others lie to us and about us and manipulate others regarding us, and that you are willing to manipulate us yourself. Those are things I can’t abide. Those are dealbreakers for me. You manipulated me when you told me that Cory had lied to me, and you manipulated me for the sake of a man who is currently lying to his wife and pinning that lie on his own daughter. You tried to manipulate Cory when you told him that Chris and I were trying to turn him and Zoey against you by telling him what you’d said, and when you denied having said it. And how long will you wait to tell Cory that you were lying? I wonder. Probably not terribly long, so that you can turn around and say “But I did tell you the truth eventually!” But then how long, after that, will it be before you do the same thing again. You apologize and are contrite and seemingly humble… and then you’re abusive and manipulative and deceptive. And yes, you HAVE been abusive. Behaving the way that you did toward Cory, AFTER you had stabbed in him the back, was abusive. You’ve been abusive toward me in the past and I fully expect you to do it again. And so you’re wonderful and nice, and then you’re mean and deceptive and manipulative. All things that, if I recall correctly, were fairly good reasons for us to get as far away as we could from Gary.

I learned far more than you did from that situation, by the way.

I don’t want your apology. These are the things that you have done. Those are your reasons. I don’t want to hear your apologies, or your justifications, or any more of your explanations and your “Ok, but listen, just listen to me, because that’s not why I did it, that’s not what’s going on, that’s not what I said”s, because they’re meaningless. You may believe them yourself for all I know, but they aren’t true, and I won’t hear them anymore. What I said up there is all reality, whether you want to admit it or not. It’s not “the way that I see it”, it is what you yourself have proven to be so. I don’t want your penance. What Cory does is up to him, and whether or not he has anything to do with you is entirely his choice.

But as far as I am concerned, you are someone who is willing to manipulate and abuse your own children, and who is willing to lie about your own children and help someone ELSE to lie about your own children, and damn the consequences… you told me yourself that people can act crazy in situations like this. If Barb really thinks that I made all of this up to break up hers and Bill’s marriage… you have no idea what her reaction towards me might be, and you don’t care. You’re willing to risk me for your lies and for the lies of an abusive, vindictive, manipulative man. And then you “give up” because you “keep screwing up”. Which tells me nothing more than that you are willing to do these things, but instead of making things right, you want immediate absolution and forgiveness. That tells me that you don’t understand exactly what you’ve done to the two of us, how you’ve damaged us, and what it means. I don’t hate you. I don’t even refuse to forgive you. But I don’t trust you, not as you are. And you can ask your god for any absolution you like, and perhaps he will continue to put up with you turning around and doing it again. Perhaps that’s all he CAN do. “They may never forgive me, but I know that you will, because you are what I have decided that you are, and I know how you think.” It is a very good excuse to keep an imaginary friend around.

I don’t want to hear what you have to say. Don’t respond to me. I write this to show you what you’ve done and nothing more. I don’t even care what you do with it. I doubt that it will do any good, and frankly it’s more for me than it is for you. I feel a need, to state the truth. The reality. And if you respond I won’t read it.

I’ve mentioned how awesome Chris’s family is. Without getting TOO ridiculously sappy, his parents have helped us out more in the past year than I think my parents have ever helped me, and they’ve renewed my faith in biological families.

Not that I wasn’t pro-boobies before, of course. ;) But now, it’s personal.

This is the email I sent out to friends to solicit prayers and support. Figured I’d go ahead and share that here.

Some of you have had the honor and priveledge of meeting my dear friend Kandice who was my roommate for the three years following the death of my son, and some of you have not. For those of you who have not, rest assured, you would adore her. To those friends of mine who are Christians, she has always embodied the most exemplary form of God’s love and Christ’s grace and mercy that I have ever seen. For those who are not, she is the most non-judgmental, compassionate, friendly person you would ever meet. Although we haven’t had much contact since I moved out of her apartment a couple of years ago, she has always been supportive and loving and a ready ear for whatever I’m going through. She still sends me cards on my son’s birthday.

And I found out today that she has been diagnosed with Inflammatory Breast Cancer.

Kandice has a wonderful supportive family and, because of her big, compassionate heart and her ready involvement in any cause or action which could use her helping hand, she is surrounded by many caring friends. But I am asking you, if you pray, to pray for her… to whatever god or goddess you may pray to. Send her whatever healing energy you may have, because even though some of you don’t know her, believe me that you are lending that energy to a worthy cause. Rarely have I ever seen someone give the world as much light and love as Kandice does. I would not ask you for it if this were not true.

I don’t know much about IBC but you can bet I’m going to be doing my homework. ;) If you know Kandice and have the capability, please feel free to send her a note of encouragement and support… she would LOVE to know that you guys are thinking of her and praying for her. If you need an email addy or facebook address let me know, but I think you can also send her a note through her Caring Bridge page.

Thank you for listening. I know some of you have other things to think about and deal with, and I appreciate you reading my little note about my friend. *hugs*

I think that for a long assed time I’ve been working through some of this shit about my Dad and I’ve been banging my head into a roadblock… namely, pretending like everything’s okay to myself so that I can get along with him, have him in my life. And for a long time, of course, I’ve been asking myself if maybe he’s right about me having been a jerk of a kid (I wasn’t) and being too mal-adjusted for him to take me in when my Mother was being abusive.

I’ve been starting, just barely, over the past few days to think that maybe it really ISN’T me. Maybe it really IS him, maybe it IS his problem, and maybe it always has been.

I guess that, even as hurtful as it was, that blog entry solidified something for me. When I asked myself “What kind of parent says things like that about their kid on the internet?” I realized… it’s the kind of parent I’ve always had.

I’m not going to sit here and list all my Dad’s faults ’cause… why? I mean, he’s shown you enough of them himself, trying to warn you about what a mess I am. And no, it’s not like I haven’t gone off on some people or flown off the handle or, definitely, DEFINITELY, pushed some people away (I wonder if you’re reading? You were right, I pushed you away because of him), fulfilled my own prophecies about nobody loving me and nobody wanting me around.

But I didn’t do that to my Dad. My Dad did that to me.

I’m not in a “blame my parents for all my problems” place ’cause… again… why? What would be the point? No, the point is to find the source of the problems and work out from there. Take responsibility for what I’ve done but, honestly? Sometimes give myself a break for the fact that I didn’t know what the fuck I was doing, or where all that heartache was coming from.

At some point last night I decided to stop being angry at my Dad, deep down, like I had been. What’s the point in being angry at him? He’s got his own issues, obviously. He doesn’t have much interest in being my father… really hasn’t in a long, long time. Oh, he tells stories about how horrible my Mother was and why he couldn’t come around… but I remember how all that went down as clearly as I remember the night he left, and it’s all a bunch of worthless excuses.

And the thing is, it’s his problem. Not mine.

I didn’t do anything to make him leave, or make him not want to come around, or make him mad recently, or make him not bother to make any effort to spend time with me… except for to exist. There’s never been anything wrong with me and I’ve never been mal-adjusted, that’s just always been his excuse for not taking responsibility. I was never a fucked up kid. I wasn’t even an ANGSTY kid. His idea of bucking authority was me taking up the shower for too long and his idea of me treating him like shit was downloading pictures from the internet onto his computer’s desktop, and then him accusing me of still doing it after he’d told me to stop because he found one that I’d downloaded BEFORE he told me to stop that I hadn’t gotten around to deleting. What were the pictures of? Dragons, unicorns, artwork for a website I was working on… and I won’t even go INTO his response to Aaron when Aaron caught him in a lie about why he’d engaged AOL’s parental controls.

And that’s the bottom line. It’s not that he couldn’t deal with a kid who had angst over him leaving… he couldn’t deal with a NORMAL kid. A GOOD kid, even. And the few mistakes I DID make, he still throws in my face whenever I don’t worship the ground HE walks on.

And it’s not my problem.

I’ve never had much more than a rudimentary relationship with my father and now, especially after writing this, I’ll probably have less than that. The fact that I haven’t, and probably won’t, give him any grandkids to play grandpa with takes away most of his incentive to even bother with me. But I don’t have any use for being pissed off at him for that. I DEFINITELY don’t have any use for taking it out on other people.

And I’m sorry that I have. I’m not big on mass apologies, but I do regret that, if it matters to anyone who might be reading (it may not.)

And, more than that… I don’t have any use for taking it out on myself.

See, I didn’t do that. I didn’t leave, I didn’t move away, I didn’t come up with excuses why he couldn’t be a parent. I didn’t write any ranting blogs about how he’s crazy and manipulative and he’ll only hurt people (which, ironically, I’ve written about OTHER people - how much does THAT freak me out - but never him). The worst thing I ever said to him was that I needed a break from my entire family and that what he had said about how horrible a kid I was hurt me. I didn’t do anything to him, I didn’t treat him like shit, I wasn’t even a bad kid.

Everything he’s said about me is his own opinion, the lies he’s told himself (and others), and a mass of delusions, and I refuse to internalize it anymore. That’s it, I’m done… and it’s not even worth being angry about.